Morning shows have always had a way of bring in bad news and this time was no exception. This time, Sanam Jung is under fire for allowing blackface in her show. Pictures of models with blackened faces but fair bodies have gone viral since yesterday after the show’s official Facebook. People are fuming over the show’s use of blackface. Light-skinned models were being painted with dark make-up on their skin, which lead to suppositions over what the show intended it to be.
What led to this incident is that the show is having a series of make-up competitions where participants are given challenging tasks every day. This time, the unfortunate task was to turn dark skinned models into “beautiful brides”. Host Jung and mentors Amber and Farida told participants that they were being presented with a particularly difficult task now that they are in the advanced stages of the competition.
The fact that they emphasized on turning ‘dark skinned’ models into ‘beautiful’ brides is too offensive to let go of. And that too to turn fair skinned models into dark skinned ones first, by using a ‘Negro’ shade of the infamous Kryolan TV paint stick.
The amusing yet atrocious thing here is that the challenging task for the participants was to figure out how to contour, and pick shades, which will look good on that kind of dark complexion.
We say, how is that a challenge?!?! Is it a challenge to pick out shades for the light skinned for these ladies? We do not think so.
Words like ‘Habshi’, ‘Habshan’, ‘Makrani’ and ‘Negro’ were used profusely during the pathetic episode.
Sanam Jung even said “Inko dark kar ke negro pe le ke aana hai (Make them dark to get them to look negro).”
Whereas judge Amber said, “I’ve done the makeover of so many brides, but I’ve never had such a bride, like a Habshan, ever. But you are being presented with this challenge.”
We are disappointed with Sanam Jung is so educated yet so ignorant. We understand that the show was trying to change Pakistani’s obsession with being fair skinned however, they made it much worse by poor execution and sheer ignorance.
The producer of the show defended the activity by stating that the participants were challenged in different ways. For example, in one segment, they applied mehndi on their hands and asked them to apply make-up on their models with one hand. He further stated that his team felt there was no need to hire dark skinned models, as they had to keep things consistent. “We had to use 5 models for the entirety of the competition week, we couldn’t change them just for this segment,” he stated.
